Monday, June 30, 2008

He is, however, not a gardener—he doesn't like the labor. And besides, he's too busy lecturing at Harvard and being the pre-eminent critic of contemporary English-language letters to pick up a watering can.

One should never be that busy, and a little physical labor does the soul - and the mind - good.

....this brutal (that's a compliment, the way I use it) little short story by the New Zealand writer Janet Frame in a recent issue of TheNew Yorker. Frame published a lot of work during her lifetime but this was found after she died in 2004. It's worth reading. Her images and metaphors are strong, and so original.

Speaking of Mongolia, on Saturday afternoon Debbie and I went to see Mongol. It's OK. Acting is excellent and so is the scenery, but I don't it even rubs elbows with historical accuracy and the narrative is rather crudely linear. A hell of a lot better than Reprise, though.Of course, the great Mongol movie is Kurasawa's Dersu Uzala, which is one of the great films, period.

In "Education by Poetry," one of his finest essays, Frost argued that an understanding of how poetry works is essential to the developing intellect. He went so far as to suggest that unless you are at home in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values, "you don't know how far you may expect to ride it and when it may break down with you."

If people paid more attention to the metaphors used in discourse - the world discussed in terms of a machine, for instance - they might be less taken in by grand assertions.

... marks an anniversary for me: Nineteen years ago, on June 30, 1989, at 11:15 a.m., I downed a double whiskey and a beer at a place called, if I remember, the Olde Ale House. It was the end of my drinking career. About 45 minutes later I was settling down (sort of) in a lock-up ward in a hospital detox unit.

For Aquinas, freedom “is a means to human excellence, to human happiness, to the fulfillment of human destiny,” Weigel writes. Freedom helps us to “choose wisely and to act well as a matter of habit.” Only then can we pursue happiness suitable for a rational, moral creature and “build free and virtuous societies in which the rights of all are acknowledged, respected, and protected in law.”

Sunday, June 29, 2008

... It is not only governments who fear the trouble truth and dissent may cause; so does every human heart; for in his vegetative specter, every man is a frightened defender of his private status quo. That is one reason why governments exist. The anarchists, alas, are wrong.

From "Mystic—and Prophet," The Complete Works of W.H. Auden: Prose, Vol. II (Princeton University Press).

No, maybe the manner in which you think is changing somewhat. Just as what you remember isn't the same as how you remember. It's nice to have an encyclopedia or a dictionary handy, so you don't have to commit all that information to memory. Want to keep your memory sharp? Memorize some poetry from time to time. Do these people seriously expect me to believe that, because of the internet, they find it harder now to concentrate on reading a whole book?

A non-believer complains about "lumping godless people like me together with Stalin or Hitler as surely as it would lump Spanish Inquisitors with modern Catholics." Of course, that is the problem of thinking in terms of categories and institutions rather than in terms of individuals. Neither baptism nor apostasy guarantee even decency, let alone sanctity.

... Why publishing has gone to the dogs. (Hat tip, Maxine Clarke - I forgot this when I posted the link last night. Maxine comments that "I sympathise with the general point he is making, but the books he has chosen as examples of 'missed gems' sound distinctly unappetising to me!")

To be honest, I have my own doubts about the appeal of the books cited, but I don't live in England, either.

Some years ago I got myself sucked into writing a few humor columns for The Inquirer's long-defunct Sunday magazine. I discovered why comedians tend to be sourpusses in real life. Writing humor is very hard. Every least detail must be considered and must work. The dynamics of each sentence - both in itself and in its relation to those that precede and follow it - must be precise. When you're finished, the piece rarely seems funny, you don't feel funny, you doubt if anything is really funny, and why in the hell did you take on this assignment in the first damned place?

' "We think our decisions are conscious," said neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes ... ' We do? Even I am not so shallow as to think that my conscious mind is all of my self or even the greater part of it. The decisions one makes consciously tend to be those one is least certain of, those that one has been forced to make. Anyone who writes has to have noticed that most thinking - and the best - takes place unconsciously.' "... these data show that consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg. This doesn't rule out free will, but it does make it implausible." ' Only if you equate free will with conscious choice. You need only be conscious of the choice and assent to it for it to be free.Georg Groddeck in The Book of the It argued that we do not live so much as we are lived by what he called our It. Anyone who indulges in a little introspection from time to time will know what he means. Surely I am not the only person who has watched himself happen, as it were, and I am certainly not the only poet who listens for the lines.Perhaps someone should do a study to find out why so many neuroscientists seem to be untrained in elementary logic and are so lacking in self-awareness.

"FALSE beliefs are everywhere. Eighteen percent of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth, one poll has found."

If you don't know the answer to a question, your answer is likely to be wrong. In other words, as regards the subject of the question, you are ignorant. So in a sense you harbor a false belief. I think most people who answered this question wrong probably never really thought about it much and would have no trouble changing their minds and keeping things straight the moment you explained matters to them. I wonder if the authors of this piece think that John Kerry spent a Christmas in Cambodia. It so happens I reviewed the Swift Boat book. Here's what I had to say:

It is a pretty klutzy piece of work. The prose is frequently disfigured by eruptions of adjectivitis ("treasonous Jane Fonda"). The chapter headings and subheadings read like the front page of a tabloid - "Kerry's Antiwar Secrets," "The War Crimes Kerry Doesn't Want Investigated. " The tone throughout is intemperate. ... Still, in the midst of all this, they do manage to score a direct hit on Kerry's credibility. ... [Douglas Brinkley's Tour of Duty] done with Kerry's cooperation, "is based largely on journals and correspondence Kerrykept while on his tours of duty. " But by his own account, Kerry was in Vietnam during Christmas of 1968, in a town named Sa Dec, about 55 miles from the Cambodian border. In this account, no gunshots are in evidence. Brinkley quotes one of Kerry's letters: "the night soothes everything. . . . Visions of sugar plums really do dance through your head. . . . It's Christmas Eve. "

So misinformation gets circulated during political campaigns and is often hard to counter. Wow. And there are lots of credulous people out there. Boy, you could have fooled me. Apparently, you could have fooled the authors of this piece, too, except that they know about how the brain can lie to you and of course they're on to that. So they'll never be taken in by their brains, right?

Historians have long posited a bewildering array of consequences of the plague. The reduced population made the peasantry more valuable as workers, made them aware of their value, gave them muscle in the market, and gave rise to social mobility. Language changed as people moved across the land, and dialect was diluted. More land became available. Food supplies increased. The failure of the church to offer good reason for the pestilence weakened its hold, giving new power to skepticism and secularism.

Actually, Dave should get it, since, as Scott Stein noted in comments here, "the entire blogosphere owes all of its content to Dave Lull." What greater contribution to the study of humanity could there be?

I have not read The Leopard, though Nige persuades me that I should, and I came to Catcher in the Rye too late to be impressed (and I am not sure preppy Holden would ever have impressed blue-collar me). But Le grand Meaulnes was the magical book of my adolescence. Something else Nige and I have in common. Though I fear he is right. I started reading it again a few years ago and the person who read those many decades ago was no longer in existence.

I had very pleasant encounter with her once at Nelson Shanks's home on the Delaware (I am sometimes admitted to such rarefied venues). She had the perfectly down-to earth manner of a genuine aristocrat. And she was a great museum director.

Hopes are not vain if you take care to remind yourself that, as hopes, no surety attaches to them. Cast thy bread upon the waters.

Dr. Johnson, as if so frequently the case, is right:

No Place affords a more striking Conviction of the Vanity of human Hopes, than a publick Library … Of the innumerable Authors whose Performances are thus treasured up in magnificent Obscurity, most are undoubtedly forgotten, because they have never deserved to be remembered, and owed the Honours which they once obtained, not to Judgement or to Genius, to Labour or to Art, but to the Prejudice of Faction, the Stratagems of Intrigue, or the Servility of Adulation.

Someone should alert the WSJ copydesk that it's Sir Arthur Eddington, not Sir Thomas. The Nature of the Physical World is still worth reading, I think, if only because it is so well written.

Compare The Irrelevance of "Probability".(Hat tip, Dave Lull.) Taleb seems to be arguing prudentially and I largely agree. (I live a pretty "green" life, actually, and have always been passionately respectful of the environment. But I also know that "Nature" is an abstraction and does not take care of anything. Forests, to cite just one example, need to be managed - actively cared for - not just left to take care of themselves. If you don't believe this, stop taking care of your garden and see what happens.)

Consider physics: Newtonian models were crude approximations of the truth (wrong at the atomic level, but still useful). A hundred years ago, statistically based quantum mechanics offered a better picture — but quantum mechanics is yet another model, and as such it, too, is flawed, no doubt a caricature of a more complex underlying reality. The reason physics has drifted into theoretical speculation about n-dimensional grand unified models over the past few decades (the "beautiful story" phase of a discipline starved of data) is that we don't know how to run the experiments that would falsify the hypotheses — the energies are too high, the accelerators too expensive, and so on.

Now biology is heading in the same direction. The models we were taught in school about "dominant" and "recessive" genes steering a strictly Mendelian process have turned out to be an even greater simplification of reality than Newton's laws. The discovery of gene-protein interactions and other aspects of epigenetics has challenged the view of DNA as destiny and even introduced evidence that environment can influence inheritable traits, something once considered a genetic impossibility.

My, my. Colin Wilson is 77 today. Eccentric, to be sure, but usually fascinating. I know he has been the object of much ridicule, a good bit of it brought on by himself, but he does write well, and he communicates a passion for ideas - including some goofy one - that is admirable. Nothing wrong with thinking for yourself, and if you get some things wrong, well, join the club.

Rawi Hage should read The Gift of Rain. It might inspire him to temper his view of organized religion, which is precisely as extreme as what he objects to. Organized religions, like the human beings who are their members, are an admixture of good, bad, smart, dumb, kind, cruel. They keep people away from God as often as they bring them to Him. But to take an all or nothing attitude toward them is itself a characteristic of fanaticism.

... in what he says: In his image. But not enough. Temptation accompanies faith. Temptation to pride, arrogance, intolerance. The two unforgivable sins (because, by definition, they exclude the possibility of forgiveness) are presumption and despair. The former would seem to be the more common: "I'm saved and you should be, too, so just think and do as I."

"Always on Monday, God's in the morning papers," begins Phyllis McGinley's "The Day After Sunday."

One reads at a glance how He scolded the Baptists a little,Was firm with the Catholics, practical with the Friends,To Unitarians pleasantly noncommittal.

Ah, yes. It sounds so familiar. Hence the conclusion:

Always on Monday morning the press reportsGod as revealed to his vicars in various guises—Benevolent, stormy, patient, or out of sorts.God knows which is the God God recognizes.

In essence, then, what one understands about the world and oneself isreally not what actually exists but what is constructed by one’s mind withthe use of other cognitive tools. The problem with this is that it makesno sense in the end because what the researchers are telling us would alsobe covered by their claim and so it is also just some mental construction,which then is also some further mental construction, ad infinitum and adnauseum. But that cannot be. At some point the researchers would have toaccept that what they are telling us about the human mind is actually so,not also just a construct or invention.

Exactly. It's also a bit like saying there's no message on the answering machine, just a bunch of electromagnetic waves. Also, there is the assumption that it is the brain that does the construction or invention. The hammer and nails didn't construct the Globe Theater. The answering machine didn't leave the message.

At 6 tonight, Peter Krok will read from Looking for an Eye, at the Thomas J. Donatucci Library, 1935 Shunk St. in Philly, followed by an Open Reading. Hosted by Richard Bank. For information phone 215-685-1755.

I would suggest that mystical theology and mysticism are not the same thing. Perhaps the leading Catholic expert in mystical theology is William Johnston, S.J. Here's an account of a conversation I had with him10 years ago:

Speaking by phone from S.J. House in Tokyo, the Rev. William Johnston, a Jesuit priest who published Christian Zen in 1971, said, ``the Pope regretted that statement and after that the Vatican arranged for a dialogue in Taiwan between Christianity and Buddhism. The Pope has said very nice things about Buddhism also, and the Asian bishops speak beautiful things about Buddhism. ''

An Irishman who has lived in Japan for 47 years - ``I tell my students that Ireland is my mother and Japan is my wife'' - Father Johnston said, ``The basic thing for a Christian is the commitment to Jesus Christ and to the Gospel. . . . When I do Zen, that basic commitment is always there. The Buddhists have their commitment to the Buddha and to dharma.

``I myself am committed to dialogue,'' Father Johnston said, but ``my basic commitment is to Christianity, to Christ and the Gospel. . . . Christ is always a person, the risen person, the glorified Jesus of Nazareth. . . . The Buddha-nature is a way of speaking of the unity of being, [but] the personal dimension is not there. ''

The Japanese word zen is a translation of the Chinese word ch'an, which is itself a translation of the Sanskrit word dhyana. All mean simply meditation. But, as FatherJohnston points out in Christian Zen, it is ``not the discursive meditation wherein one reasons and thinks and makes resolutions. . . . It is meditation without an object. . . . One pays no attention to the thoughts and images that pass across the surface of the mind. . . . It is not preoccupied with past or future, right or left, up or down. One is simply present . . . in the eternal now, face to face with reality. ''

Father Johnston emphasized that Christians who practice Zen need to be aware of their own spiritual tradition. ``We get people coming to Japan - even priests and sisters sometimes - and they want to do Zen and they've never had any Christian experience in their lives and . . . that's not good. ''

Father Johnston pointed out that Buddhists exhibit great respect for Jesus. ``They see Jesus as a great mystic. . . . The recent scriptural movement with its emphasis on Jesus the man [has led us to] think that Jesus was just like the man in the street. [The Buddhists] may not recognize [Jesus'] divinity, but they see him as a Bodhisattva and a model for people who would seek enlightenment.

``There's great wisdom in Buddhism, so the thing is marriage, to put them together. That's the big challenge that's going to confront us in the 21st century. The future of Christianity is in Asia . . . not only geographically, but in Asian spirituality, and we will come more and more to the contemplative dimension. I think the Gospel has a very big future in Asia. ''

Today is the anniversary of E.T.A. Hoffman's death. Here is a clip from the Powell-Pressburger film of Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann. The orchestra is conducted is conducted by Thomas Beecham and the dancer is Moira Shearer.

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

All ambition has begun to have the reek of disease to me, the relentless smell of the self. We want to stamp our existence upon existence, our nature upon nature. We are pursuing a ghost—even my image of the dead participates in this—rather than a god.

And that is the issue, at least for me. I do think a life in poetry is a calling, but for a long time I was unwilling to admit that the call might come from God. And if he is the one calling, then he is the only one who can ratify your response.

Conventional wisdom alert: "fair and balanced (that sadly corrupted phrase)." Corrupted, I presume, because FoxNews has it as its motto. But as Rupert Murdoch has explained, it only means putting out as many different viewpoints as possible. Far from perfect, to be sure - but what isn't? And it's sure in hell better than MSNBC's lopsided approach.

Many, many years ago, when I was in college, I was riding a bus and as I looked out the window I saw a guy walking along the sidewalk who slipped on what could have been a banana peel. His legs flew up and he flopped down on his behind. I must confess that my reflexive response was to burst out laughing. It's not that I was unaware or even insensitive to the fact that this was a real and quite unpleasant fall. What caused me to laugh was how ridiculous he looked. It was like seeing a cartoon come to life. I don't think I would have reacted that way if I had been walking behind him. In that case, simple proximity wouldn't have permitted the perspective that distance provided.

The best chapter in the book (or perhaps I should say the one with which I most heartily agree) is that about a prevalent modern form of wrongful, or perverted, complaint, namely litigation. In a society with few agreed moral boundaries, people increasingly look to the law to draw those boundaries. For them, anything that is legal is permissible; only the illegal is impermissible. 'There's no law against it' or 'There's a law against it' become incontrovertible moral arguments. This, however, means that we have abdicated our freedom and given legislators total moral authority over us. Nothing stands between the isolated individual and his egotistical whims on the one hand and the government and its diktats on the other. The result is a strange and unappealing mixture of inflamed individualism and collectivist conformism.

Now, observe how this impatience acts in matters of research and speculation... Hence it is that we have the principles of utility, of combination, of progress, of philanthropy, or, in material sciences, comparative anatomy, phrenology, electricity, exalted into leading ideas, and keys, if not of all knowledge, at least of many things more than belong to them,— principles, all of them true to a certain point, yet all degenerating into error and quackery, because they are carried to excess, viz. at the point where they require interpretation and restraint from other quarters, and because they are employed to do what is simply too much for them, inasmuch as a little science is not deep philosophy.

"I really don't have a stake in any of this," he said. "I'm not a cheerleader for a certain outcome. Most liberals who despair of the current state of things, most of them think there's a solution and so they're naturally disappointed. It's built into their thinking system.

"I know there's no solution, so I just enjoy what's here and I enjoy the journey."

This is a good account of the reading experience. But what of those who can;t give such an account. C.S. Lewis has something to say about that in his essay "On Stories":

When you see an immature or uneducated person devouring what seem to you merely sensational stories, can you be sure what kind of pleasure he is enjoying? It is, of course, no good asking him. If he were capable of analysing his own experience as the question requires him to do, he would be neither uneducated nor immature. But because he is inarticulate we must not give judgement against him. He may be seeking only the recurring tension of imagined anxiety. But he may also, I believe, be receiving certain profound experiences which are, for him, not acceptable in any other form.

... but I still think this may portend something: Encounter Bids The New York York Times Farewell. (Hat tip, Dave Lull. Actually, I had seen this earlier today, but had been reluctant to post a link because I was afraid it would inspire partisan comments, which I can do without. But Dave's sending it to me helped me make up my mind.)

And God knows, they wouldn't think of charging with a hate crime if he said the same about Chrstianity. This whole hate crime business is ridiculous anyway. If a bunch of guys jumps me and beats me up, I don't care what their feelings were toward me (prima facie evidence would be "not well disposed"). I want them charged with aggravated assault.

Have you guys seen this yet? This site wowio lets you legally download PDFs of books for free, but the authors get compensated. They're able to do this by putting ads in there somewhere. Hm. I haven't downloaded one yet so I don't know how this affects the reading experience, but this service seems like it could be a good way for indy publishers to get their work out there.

"...50 years ago, an educated person would have been apologetic if he had never read Ulysses ..."

Really? I was around 50 years ago and I knew some pretty well-educated people. I never heard anybody apologize for not having read Ulysses. I think that's the sort of thing only the intellectually insecure would do. (Have I read it? Yes. Twice, in fact.)

Once again, Auden, wriitng in 1939: "...the picture of the State as a strata of ruled and ruling classes is ceasing to be altogether adequate; it is becoming more and more, the united professional politicians and bureaucrats versus the disunited rest."

"... how much happier we would all be if we gave up following the news and devoted ourselves to more edifying pursuits."

Then why don't we all do just that. If enough of us boycotted newspapers and news magazines and news shows, the drop in circulation and ratings and revenue might actually get the attention not only of the media moguls, but also of the people most often featured in the news, namely, craven politicians and fatuous stars and celebrities. It would be wonderful for them to realize how much we could do without them. In the meantime the rest of us could engage in what C.S. Lewis called a "lived dialectic" with great art, music and literature - and, by extension, with life itself.

I saw the trailer for this just before sitting through the execrable Reprise. I could draw no connection between anything in the trailer and my memory of the novel. And of course the novel minus the Catholicism is simply not the novel.

Saturday, June 21, 2008

But congratulations most of all to our friend Judith Fitzgerald, whose "epic poem in four books," O, Clytaemnestra!, is among the poetry nominees. Judith is a real poet, a great person, and genuinely original. I hope she wins.

The amazing thing about the success of the Columbus argument is that it depends on premises that are so obviously faulty. Indeed, a moment’s reflection reveals that the Columbus argument is undermined by a downright glaring weakness. Granted that every change for the better has depended on someone embarking on a new departure: well, so too has every change for the worse. And surely, Stove writes, there have been at least as many proposed innovations which “were or would have been for the worse as ones which were or would have been for the better.” Which means that we have at least as much reason to discourage innovators as to encourage them, especially when their innovations bear on things as immensely complex as the organization of society. As Lord Falkland admonished, “when it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not change.”

Lord Falkland's pronouncement is a favorite of mine.

This quote from Roger Scruton makes much the same point as I was trying to here:

The scientific attempt to explore the “depth” of human things is accompanied by a singular danger. For it threatens to destroy our response to the surface. Yet it is on the surface that we live and act: it is there that we are created, as complex appearances sustained by the social interaction which we, as appearances, also create. It is in this thin top-soil that the seeds of human happiness are sown, and the reckless desire to scrape it away —a desire which has inspired all those “sciences of man,” from Marx and Freud to sociobiology—deprives us of our consolation.

... then we can be sure of one thing: a good many academics are neither as smart as they think they are nor very well-mannered. No intelligent person with any manners is a bigot: Academia and Religion.

More here, though. But what does it say about someone who thinks poorly of a person's religion because of that person's politics?

"A few weeks earlier the great Humphrey Lyttelton, who came from an aristocratic family, went to his grave without title, having turned down an honour from John Major’s Government. Lyttelton liked the motto “Unto thine own self be true”, carved above the stage of the Conway Hall in London, the venue of his legendary Humph at the Conway album."

"To thine own self be true" is Polonius' advice to Laertes in Hamlet. Problem is, Polonius is a sententious old fool. After all, there may be things greater than oneself to be true to.

I interviewed Michael Nyman once, prior to the premiere of his piece HRT, which was commissioned by Philly's Relache ensemble. I found him quite engaging. And I like his string quartets.

...is at it again! Episode 4 of the super-stylish interactive story Inanimate Alice is out now. If you've never experienced it, interactive fiction is part story, part game. I've reported on Alice before because I think it's unique and really beautiful. (Wait till you hear the music. I'm so into it. It's like the soundtrack for a spooky-cool movie.) In episode four (of an eventual ten) Alice is 14 years old and living with her strangely itinerant parents in a rough-around-the-edges English town. In each chapter so far Alice has gotten herself into and out of a tense situation and this one is no exception, though in fact it feels more realistic than the others before it because it makes use of photography in addition to digital images. Go have a look. It takes about 30 minutes to view (play?) the story.

I actually enjoy going to a ball game from time to time - just as I like playing the ponies from time to time. But I do find the intensity of some fans peculiar. Sometime last year I was in a cab and the radio was tuned to one of the local sports radio stations. I was amazed at the minutiae the callers were discussing. I was equally amazed that anyone would want to listen to this stuff. But then I'm amazed that people want to listen to talk radio, period, whatever the topic.

I'm not sure if all roads do lead to resentment, but all roads certainly can. Were I writer of fiction, I could, I am sure, cast my upbringing in the most Dickensian of shadows. Which is only to say that I've had my share of bad breaks, too. In fact, I look back on my childhood as unwontedly pleasant. For whatever reason, setbacks don't set me back very much. I think it's because I don't like to feel bad, so when I do, I fish around for something to distract me and, if possible, cheer me up. I also don't tend to get exercised about things over which I have little or no control.

Nobody gets out of here alive, but with some luck and some prudence you may be able get out relatively unscathed.

She does remember the plane, though. "The plane, in the thickening darkness, was now but a thicker darkness, and distinguishable only because her eyes were still fixed on it. If she moved she would lose it. If she lost it, she would be left in the midst of this - this lull. "

A lull that feels peculiar:

All the lulls she had ever known were not as deep as this, in which there seemed no movement at all. . . . She was alone with this night in the City . . . but all in a silence she did not know, so that if she yielded to the silence she would not know those other things, and the whole place would be different and dreadful.

Lester briefly encounters her husband, Richard, but he soon fades, "as if he were a ghost. " Then she meets Evelyn Mercer, the young woman she had been with before her eyes became fixed on the plane and the lull settled. Evelyn does not fade. Together they wander the silent city, where "there was never any sun" and where the moon, "large and bright and cold . . . hung in the sky," though "there was no moonlight on the ground. "

All Hallows' Eve, first published in 1945, the year of Charles Williams' death, was the last of his seven novels, which T.S. Eliot - who wrote the introduction - aptly described as "supernatural thrillers. " Williams was one of the Inklings, the informal literary group whose best-known members were C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Born in 1886, Williams was older than the others, and he spent most of his adult life working for the Oxford University Press.

All Hallows' Eve, of course, is another name for Halloween - the eve of All Saints' Day. Williams' choice of title is significant. No cutesy witches, ghosts or goblins in these pages. The central character here is an evil wizard named Simon the Clerk, a direct descendant - by profession if not heredity - of Simon Magus. Simon aims to dominate the world in a most thorough-going way: by enslaving the souls of its inhabitants. (Early in life, Williams had been a member of a Rosicrucian temple that had some connection with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, whose most notorious member was Aleister Crowley. So Williams knew more than most about high magic. )

All Hallows' Eve, in other words, is about genuine evil on a cosmic scale, and Williams' skill at depicting the interpenetration of the temporal and eternal is downright uncanny. Thanks to "the first grace of a past redeemed into love," Lester's vision and perception are both cleansed and enlarged:

She saw a glowing and glimmering city, of which the life was visible as a roseal wonder within. The streets of it were first the streets of today, full of business of today . . . Then, gently opening, she saw among those streets other streets . . . into which her own London opened or with which it was intermingled. No thought of confusion crossed her mind; it was all very greatly ordered, and when down a long street she saw, beyond the affairs of today, the movement of sedan chairs and ancient dresses, and beyond them again, right in the distance and yet very close to her, the sun glittering on armor, and sometimes a high battlemented gate, it was no phantasmagoria of a dream but precise actuality. She was . . . looking along time.

The action takes place on two planes simultaneously: the here and now of London in 1945 and the twilight world that Lester and Evelyn find themselves in. The intended means of Simon's world domination is his daughter, Betty Wallingford. Betty's mother, Lady Wallingford, is Simon's principal disciple. She has told Betty - whom she hates - that she was adopted. Betty is able, through Simon's hypnotic skills, to enter the time-encompassing city where Lester and Evelyn, her onetime schoolmates, are.

The artist Jonathan Drayton has fallen in love with Betty, and to please her mother has painted a portrait of Simon. Lady Wallingford, however, finds the portrait - which seems to give the magician an abstracted, almost imbecilic look and to depict his followers as an army of beetles - revolting and offensive. The Clerk himself, however, is taken with it, telling Drayton, "That is I."

Richard, Drayton and Lester must rescue Betty from Simon and by so doing thwart his grand scheme. Compared with their self-possessed - indeed self-obsessed - antagonist, they seem quite ordinary. But that is Williams' point: Great evil happens not only when men and women commit horrendous crimes, but as often as not because they fail to perform ordinary acts of kindness and generosity, take others for granted, and are too quick to compromise on behalf of petty ambition and personal convenience and advantage. In Williams' vision of Halloween, we are our own goblins - and not at all cute.